Design workshops

The "Ateliers Design" (design workshops) program brings together some fifteen intensive workshops over the course of a blocked week at three schools (École nationale des ponts et chaussées, Ensa Paris-Est and Penninghen).

Student engineers, architects and designers work in multi-disciplinary teams to design and manufacture an object with at least one mechanical function in one week. The objects are varied in nature: bicycles, gliders, boats, bridges, towers, shelters, hulls, fans... with no restrictions other than their feasibility with the schools' resources. All objects must be resource-efficient, which means playing with the limits of materials.

The aim of these design/creation workshops is, on the one hand, to establish a link between mathematical knowledge and its physical materialization, by giving students the means to estimate the orders of magnitude of the physical phenomena involved; on the other hand, to enter into the intelligence of matter and understand that we don't make the same thing at all scales and with all materials.

This week offers student engineers, architects and designers the opportunity to:

• reflect on the relationship between the function and form of an object, and give them their first experience of the technical design process.
• meet and compare the dynamics of different skills through a shared awareness of technical issues,
• work together, an objective too rarely taken into account in French education,
• concentrate the strengths of a teaching process developed by the École nationale des ponts et chaussées and Ensa Paris-Est aimed at training engineer-architects, an essential profile for designing and building major structures.